When comparing Moai SDK vs Clickteam Fusion 2.5, the Slant community recommends Moai SDK for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?”Moai SDK is ranked 21st while Clickteam Fusion 2.5 is ranked 34th. The most important reason people chose Moai SDK is:

Pros

Pro

Fast

Pro

Gives you total control

You can use your own custom shaders and extend the language with C++. MOAI doesn't give you everything, instead it gives you the tools you need to develop any game you want.

Pro

Full source code is available

So it is extendable with C++

Pro

Easy-to-use particle engine

Uses a limited subset of Lua

Pro

Uses Lua, with LuaJIT where possible

Pro

Is used by many pro developers

Moai SDK is used by popular developers including Double Fine for their mobile game, Middle Manager of Justice, and for their Kickstarter hit, Broken Age(formerly, Double Fine Adventure.) It was also used to create the popular mobile game Bubble Ball 2.This proves that this engine can be used to make fully-featured and fun games.

Pro

API interfaces

Has options for development like Hanappe and Rapanui, providing a different way to interact with the engine.

Pro

Helpful community

The Moai SDK Forum is active and users will go to great extents to answer queries, post code snippets, beta test, and even purchase and give feedback on each others' games.

Pro

Helpful and detailed documentation

Although the Moai SDK is very advanced and uses complicated features, the documentation wiki thoroughly and clearly explains how to use these features, such as the Moai Cloud(a service that provides web services for your game), and multiple ways to build from source.

Pro

Export native runtime for all platforms

Be it Windows EXE, Android APK, iOS, HTML5 and Flash SWF, Fusion 2.5 is able to export your game to fast, truly native runtime for specified platform with a click.

Pro

Intuitive drag & drop interface & visual event editor

CF2.5 uses a straightforward drag & drop editor that allows for easy level, animation and event creation without having to write a single line of code.

Pro

Not only is it the best, it is the original

This software has been around since 1994 (then called Klik & Play) and is still going very strong. Also, one of the founders of Clickteam was the developer of STOS BASIC and AMOS BASIC for the Atari ST and Amiga computers.

Pro

Community-driven extensive object repository

Click Fusion has a great selection of extensions submitted by the community.

The extensions cover a variety of game-building tasks including parsing of strings using up to two alternating delimiters using the "Tokenizer Object", generating random numbers without reusing them from multiple lists which can be refilled and distinctively replenished with the "Random Multipool Object" among others.

Pro

Developers work so closely with the user base

Dedicated Bug tracking system linked to user forum for ease of access.

Pro

Box2D physics engine included on all platforms

Clickteam Fusion 2.5 brings to you the box2D physics engine.

Pro

Can also create Windows applications

CF allows creating Windows applications. Additionally, due to hundreds of available extensions, the process is quick.

Pro

Well-optimized

Runs well under high object numbers, particularly on PC and iOS thanks to hardware acceleration.

Pro

Upgrade discounts

If you buy Fusion 2.5, and later decide you want to upgrade to the Developer version, or in the case of moving from MMF2 to F2.5, the company offers upgrade discounts.

Pro

Free version

Pro

Supportive, passionate community

Any time you have a question or a problem, the community and the software developers are there to help you out either on forums or steam. The devs repond quickly to private messages or instantly on ClickConverse (chat). Additionally, many users have support sites with open source examples and tutorials.

Pro

Permissive runtime license agreement

With the Developer edition of the product, there are absolutely no limits or requirements when selling your creations. You are free to make as much money as you want (this applies to the Standard edition too), and you don't have to include any logos or credits in your creations.

Pro

Balanced feature set

An excellent compromise between ease of use, power, flexibility and ability to export to different platforms. Easy to learn for beginners with the ability to make complex things, of course, at the expense of a larger effort. Good rapid application development tool for making 2D games.

Pro

Great IRL user events

Clickteam holds user conventions for customers to come along, meet the staff and hang out with people who they've met online. This furthers the community spirit which is so prevalent around Clickteam's products and it's a fantastic weekend.

Pro

Exports native mobile code, making great performance games

Pro

A great unofficial community for Spanish-speaking users

A great community in Spanish where you will receive all the help you need to solve your doubts and problems. You'll also find all kinds of resources and materials in Spanish.

Pro

Stable

Have used fusion 2.5 through all of its iterations, even when it was owned by imsi as CNC ( click n create ) it has been very stable and projects have been known to run on almost any Windows based computer. The projects you create even run on future versions of Windows with never many issues.

Pro

Great online store to get free and paid assets

Pro

Great for non-game apps, such as tools, utilities, multimedia projects, etc.

Pro

Great formula editor, which allows you to create complex maths and events with ease

Pro

Box2D physics engine

Pro

Can create custom extensions

Pro

Visual (HLSL) effects

Ad

Cons

Con

Not for beginning developers

The Moai SDK has very advanced features which allow it to create powerful games. A drawback from this is that it is not very suitable for beginners.

Con

Not necessarily tested or stable

Con

Scarce documentation

Since it is a minimalist framework there is not that much documentation, but if you are used to reading API references and source code you are good to go!

Con

Development has ceased

The last update was over a year ago. Users should not expect things to still work on future OS versions unless they're ready to fix them yourself.

Con

Some features are really outdated and major updates are few and rare

There are some features that could make the software a lot more powerful but Clickteam does not have the staff resources to handle updating the software to be competitive with similar software.

Con

Many extensions not available on non-Windows platforms

A lot of community-made extensions are only written for Windows, making it hard to port your game to other platforms.

Con

Its Event Editor can be cumbersome if you are working on complex projects

While Fusion's visual programming event system is great to simplify things, it can be much more cumbersome to work with it than reading lines of code when you are working on a complex project. Especially if your events involve many nested conditions and lots of objects on the frame.

You are able to group events and objects, but it doesn't help at all if there's lots of conditions on an event and it becomes pretty hard to read.

Con

No animation/object hierarchy

You need to position/rotate objects manually.

Con

Many event 'gotchas', especially with object selection

Many events have very unpredictable selection behavior, e.g. the 'Create' action (where the selection depends on whether a selection list already exists).

There is also a lot of subtle selection behavior, e.g. implicit object pairs for actions when an object is used in an expression.

Con

No native animator with curves, etc

Con

Slow event system

Since the event system is interpreted, complex frames will start to slow down. This is also caused by poor code reuse, as usually, you need to copy+paste events with new conditions, making it impossible to cache intermediate results.

Con

Poor native movements

The native non-physical movements are practically unusable if you don't want to use Box2D physics in your game.

Con

Cannot script editor

You cannot script the IDE or editor with e.g. macros or custom functionality, like you can in other popular game engines.

Con

Need to write C++ extensions when existing extensions don't cut it

If you need e.g. a Steamworks extension or 3D display extension, you need to move out from the event system and create extensions in C++ with a cumbersome API. Fusion does not have FFI calls like other programming languages

The free edition is severely limited

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